There's no turning back

I ran into some of the other Notre Dame kids heading to Cairo at Chicago-O'Hare, which instantly made the rest of the trip easier. During our layover at Frankfurt, we met some other students heading to Cairo as well. One of the first things Mark and I noticed in Frankfurt was the warning signs on cigarettes. It wasn't your standard "The Surgeon General says studies link smoking to increased chances of lung cancer;" they simply said "SMOKING KILLS." In Cairo, there are no warning lables on cigarettes.

I was very optimistic and positive on the plane from Frankfurt to Cairo, but Cairo International quickly killed any idea of this being an easy transition. The place is much dirtier, hotter, and crowded than any place you would find in America. Things don't seem to take their time deteriorating. As we were hearded onto buses by AUC officials we had never met and driven driven to the Zamalek dorm through a city we had never been to, I couldn't help but notice how negatively different Cairo is than any other major city I've been to. Every building facade in run down. For any building built in the last 60 years, architecture appears to have been an afterthought. Most of the apartment complexes are at least fifteen stories tall and are loaded at the top with dusty satellite dishes, giving them the appearance of a communications broadcast tower.

When we arrived at the Zamalek dorm, nothing around me looked like I had expected it to. All the guidebooks said Zamaled was one of the nicest residential areas in Cairo, and that for many years it was reserved for wealthy British officials. Many countries' embassies are still located on the island. But when we walked the surrounding area to buy cell phones and exchange money, Zamalek looked more like the bad side of St. Louis you were always told not to stray into while downtown for a Cardinals game.

Mark was put in contact with Abdel Maged through Notre Dame's campus ministry. He attended grad school at Notre Dame for engineering and is now a professoar at the University of Giza. He offered to take us out to dinner on the night of our arrival. We met him in front of the dorm and we took a taxi to a restaurant in Giza. It was a place in the states you might call a hole in the wall, but here it was very nice. The food they served was much like the food at Elia's, a mediterranean restaurant in South Bend. We had tabouli, babaganouj, beef and lamb kebab, and of course hummus. All and all the food was delicious and we hithced a ride back to Zamalek on one of the many cramped minibuses. Abdel lives in Zamalek, so he walked us around the island for a little while before we headed back to the dorm. One of the things we learned is that we must adjust our scale for what we consider "nice." On the outside, even the expensive residences (condos with owners who make over 500K a year) look run down on the outside. That's just the way it is here. Traffic is a madhouse, with no real traffic lights to speak of. Pedestrians often cross through traffic, and there is an unwritten understanding between cars and people that allows all to flow through the streets at once.

Mostly right now I'm thinking "What they hell did I get myself into," but Abdel showing us around helped a bit. With time maybe I can adjust.